The Folsom Rewind

By Bruce Shaffer

Edgar is a forlorn husband drinking his troubles away. Sally is his angry wife. Can they work out their problems in this action-filled adventure that navigates the course of time . . . BACKWARD? From present-day Folsom to the goldrush era, you'll meet memorable characters like Joe, a Folsom Prison inmate and his cellmate, Smiley; Gertie, a good-natured elementary school teacher of Maidu origin; Hank, a hard-working housecleaner with a questionable past; and Jesse, a gregarious and heroic gunslinger.

Remarkably, they're all somehow connected in the space-time continuum, which details some of Folsom's rich history, such as Johnny Cash's iconic performance at Folsom Prison in 1968. Time ticks on relentlessly, but in The Folsom Rewind it wiggles and wags, twists and turns, zigs and zags more mysteriously than ever . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce Shaffer
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215174777

Bruce Shaffer

Bruce Shaffer has written feature magazine stories and sports articles for publications near his adopted hometown of Folsom, California. As a civil engineer, he authored many water resources documents during his 26-year career. Now retired, Bruce enjoys tapping into his life experiences and creativity to compose works of non-fiction and fiction. He lives happily with his wonderful wife, a playful dog, and a defiant cat; and has two awesome grown sons in Northern California.

Book preview

THE FOLSOM REWIND

Bruce Shaffer

Smashwords Edition 2023

ISBN 9798215174777

Copyright 2023 Bruce Shaffer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission of the author/publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

All characters in this book, with the exception of some well-known historical figures, have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation to anyone bearing the same name or names. Any resemblance to individuals known or unknown to the author are purely coincidental.

Published by Bruce Shaffer

[e-mail]

ON THE COVER

Folsom’s iconic Rainbow Bridge (photo credit to Pinterest).

DEDICATION

For the residents of Folsom, California, my adopted hometown and outdoor playground.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thanks to my wife Karen, sons Joel and Matt, and friends Pete Springer and Michelle Young for taking the time to read and comment on the manuscript. If you stacked all of their valuable suggestions end to end the stack would reach all the way to . . . well, you get the idea. Another thanks goes to the Folsom city planners who had the foresight to develop such a great bike trail system around here. Many parts of the manuscript were composed in my head while riding on the trails with the wind in my face and the scenic landscape passing by.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1 WHITE AS A GHOST

CHAPTER 2 HEAD OF A RATTLESNAKE

CHAPTER 3 THE BIG HOUSE

CHAPTER 4 STELLA THE GOAT

CHAPTER 5 FOLSOM PRISON BLUES

CHAPTER 6 A 12-PACK OF CONDOMS

CHAPTER 7 THE CONDOM KILLER

CHAPTER 8 A GRAY-BEARDED FACE

CHAPTER 9 A LABORER’S HANDS

CHAPTER 10 THE GUNSLINGER EXTRAORDINAIRE

CHAPTER 11 A HIGHER AUTHORITY

CHAPTER 12 TWO GREEN BALLS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

My wife and I moved to Folsom, California four years ago. Four years; that’s four trips around the sun on our glorious warming earth, four rings in a tree trunk cross-section, or four migrations of duck and geese south for the winter.

Yes, time can be quantified in many ways. We all know how long its basic unit is, the second. It’s about the time it takes a snail to travel one centimeter, a bullet to travel 900 meters, or the International Space Station to rocket 7,700 meters while in orbit. We say, Gimme a second (or Gimme a sec for short), Hang on a sec, or Be there in a sec.

The second was defined as 1/86,400 of a day after the invention of the mechanical clock in the 14th century. Then later as 1/31,556,925.9747 of a year. Now it’s how long for a Cesium atom to vibrate 9,192,631,770 times. Who knew a second was so precise? Beyond the second are, of course, the minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, and century.

Many entities I once thought to be absolute, aren’t. For example, in California the availability of water for farmers and homeowners certainly isn’t guaranteed anymore. And that Major League Baseball player who was safe at first, upon further review, is actually out. Truth isn’t absolute anymore either. Now it can be postulated as being an alternative fact.

Even time isn’t absolute. Is a second always a second? The brilliant physicist Albert Einstein explained in his Special Theory of Relativity the phenomenon of time dilation— when an object moves very fast it experiences time more slowly than when it’s at rest. So, a person traveling at close to the speed of light (186,282.397 miles per second) would age slower than a person who’s not. That’s weird stuff, and interpreted theatrically in many ways.

In the 1997 movie Contact with Jody Foster, the dramatic ending includes a time dilation that’s backwards. Dr. Ellie Arroway (Foster) records a mysterious 18 hours of static while whizzing through several wormholes in her transport pod at close to the speed of light, which means a duration much greater than 18 hours should have elapsed on earth. Instead, only mere seconds have elapsed while Dr. Arroway’s pod inexplicably falls harmlessly through the transport machine to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

In the 1985 movie Back to the Future with Michael J. Fox, a van with two Libyan terrorists chases Marty McFly (Fox) who’s escaping in a highly-modified DeLorean DMC-12 at the Twin Pines Mall. When Marty reaches 88 miles per hour (not the speed of light), he suddenly finds himself transported back to 1955 and plows the DeLorean right through a scarecrow in a vacant grass field before crashing into an old wooden barn. That’s a better example of time travel, not time dilation.

Perhaps the most liberal interpretation of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Commander Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) leaves his spaceship, the Discovery, in an extravehicular activity pod in search of intelligent life after rogue computer HAL has killed all of his crew. The pod enters a wormhole and ends up in a bedroom with a luminous white floor and late 18th-century French furniture.

Commander Bowman exits the pod and slowly walks through the bedroom into a bathroom. He sees himself in the mirror as an old man now (again a backwards time dilation). Then he’s an even older version of himself eating at a table in the bedroom. He takes a sip from a wine glass before knocking it onto the floor and breaking it. Then he’s yet a third, even older version of himself resting on a bed. He points at the iconic black monolith which appears in the center of the bedroom, and is transformed into a big-eyed fetus in the gestational sac, which floats through space and gazes at the earth. Now that’s quite the application of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity!

As I said, my wife and I moved to Folsom four years ago. It’s a diverse city of 80,454 residents (2020 census), with a thriving technical industry (primarily Intel), a famous penitentiary (Folsom State Prison), and a less famous multipurpose dam and lake (Folsom Lake). It has numerous bike trails, the Folsom Powerhouse State Historic Park, and the Folsom Pro Rodeo, which draws cowboys from all over the country each year during the 4th of July holiday. But it wasn’t always that way.

Folsom has a rich history of gold miners seeking their fortune, as do many other settlements in Northern California. Few actually found it. Named for real estate developer Joseph Libbey Folsom, Folsom grew from a few gold mining camps near the American River to a burgeoning community with the completion of the Sacramento Valley Railroad in 1856, which connected the area to Sacramento and ultimately to San Francisco by boat along the Sacramento River. Not until 1946 did Folsom incorporate to become a small city, with a voracious appetite to grow even more.

The Folsom Rewind goes back in time from present-day Folsom to the goldrush era. Along the way you’ll meet memorable characters like Edgar, a forlorn husband drinking his troubles away; his angry wife, Sally; Joe, a Folsom Prison inmate and his cellmate, Smiley; Gertie, a good-natured elementary school teacher of Maidu origin; Hank, a hard-working housecleaner with a questionable past; and Jesse, a gregarious and heroic gunslinger.

Yes, time can be quantified in many ways, and distorted in many ways. Still, it ticks on relentlessly and more mysteriously than ever . . .

Return to Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

WHITE AS A GHOST

A middle-aged man ambled down historic Sutter Street in Folsom, California. He was a bit disheveled, with